An approach towards situation specific planning of design processes

Today companies do not only have to be competitive regarding products and technologies, but also the handling of complex, multi-dimensional processes gains more and more importance [1]. Therefore process management tools have been established to support the designing and optimization of processes and workflows. These tools are very well applicable for business and design processes that are structured, repetitive, and can be planned in advance. But most of the existing approaches do not take into consideration the specific requirements and boundary conditions in concrete product development situations [2]. Design processes evolve in progress. Process phases and steps often can be planned only if results from previous steps are on hand. Moreover, the general conditions of a single planning situation, e.g. available capacities or specific requirements, have considerable influence on which step to take next. Therefore product development processes have to be planned and defined problem- and situation-specific. This contribution provides an approach to situation-specific planning of design processes. The design situation will be described by means of their crucial situation-defining parameters at different degrees of process decomposition. Based on the situation analysis a suitable design process might be recommended. Since the level of planning detail of this process depends on the degree of process decomposition, it is one of the most important points of this approach to realise a crosslink between the different degrees of decomposition. Thus, a better transparency, higher value and quality of planning information shall be achieved.